THE LAST WESTERN [W, 6-17-26]

CHRIST IN WINTER: The Irrelevant Social Commentary of An Old Westerns Fan—THE LAST WESTERN [W, 6-17-26]

 

It was TV’s “rural purge” that did it.

From WWII to the end of the Gunsmoke TV series, Westerns reigned supreme as the primary entertainment genre. I grew up in that era of Western stories as entertainment—radio, movies, books, TV.

My hero was The Lone Ranger. Tonto, also. And Red Ryder. Little Beaver, also. Western heroes needed “faithful Indian companions,” but they were always the “and,” the “also,” the add-on.

As a kid, I loved the Westerns on the radio, and the Saturday matinees. As I got older, the Old West was still my era of choice for entertainment. It was for most folks who had switched from radio to TV and movies, too.

We loved Bonanza and The Virginian and Have Gun; Will Travel.

We loved the Cartwrights and Marshall Dillon and Paladin on TV.

We loved Paul Newman and Robert Redford and Gabby Hayes and Richard Boone in the movies.

We loved the writers, like Elmore Leonard. Terry Johnstone. Louis Lamour. Zane Grey. Tom Eidson.

And JR McFarland. Yes, I thought I should have a semi-pen name for the many Westerns I was going to write, to distinguish me from John Robert McFarland--who wrote stuff about religion and cancer and humor and anything else that came up--but still acknowledge, sort of, that I was that guy, with more than one career.

I really thought that when I retired, I would have a career as a novelist, especially Western novels. After all, An Ordinary Man was published by HarperCollins even before I retired. It was well-received and sold forty thousand copies. That sounded good.

What I didn’t know was that in 1995, there were only forty thousand Westerns readers left. I had gotten around to writing Westerns at the end of that era. A guy doing a Westerns historical archive asked me for an autographed copy of my book. I didn’t realize that being included in an historical archive wasn’t really a good thing.

No entertainment era lasts forever. That is partially because changes in technology make new forms of entertainment possible. But Westerns made the move to TV quite well. In fact, Westerns made TV as popular as it was. But TV was also the reason for the fall of Westerns, because of “the rural purge.”

Westerns celebrated a WWII mentality, good guys against bad guys. They even wore different colored Stetsons so you could identify them easily—white hats for the good guys, black hats for the bad.

The Folk music revival of the 1960s fit well with that mentality. It provided the musical ethos for Westerns. Its most celebrated hero was “a condemned man named Tom Dooley,” who was facing rural frontier justice “down in some lonesome valley, hanging from a white oak tree.”  

But then came rock and roll. The Beetles. Elvis. A Viet Nam war mentality, when it was not at all easy to tell the good guys from the bad. Westerns were “rural.” TV execs were seeking younger urban watchers who would be better customers for the advertisers of cosmetics and cars. Thus, “the rural purge.”

So, my Western novel writing career came to a sliding halt. Just as well. I was pretty good at coming up with titles. A good title often has the word “last” in it, like this column. I wasn’t very good at figuring out a good conclusion, though. Sort of like this column…

John Robert McFarland

I really thought An Ordinary Man would make a great movie. I even cast it, with Richard Harris as the ordinary man. I’m sorry you didn’t get to see it.

“It’s terrible to outlive your own generation.” Djuna Barnes